Life of Pi :: loosing Richard Parker

tomer :: about Life of Pi from Amazon: "The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker "
these drawings were done based on scenes from the book. the local (English) publisher was looking to reprint an illustrated version of the book and a competition was in place to choose an illustrator.
I enjoyed the book and was inspired by the simple structure of the story that somehow managed to capture a deep universal truth. that said, my tendencies to overly visualize horror while Disneyfiying the shit out of everything might have worked against me.
as I was working on these I consciously restricted myself to flat surfaces, I tried to keep it as un-painterly as possible so it doesn't become too heavy when seen as a series. the second self inflicted rule was to flatten down the perspective to an extant. this approach was based on some phenomenal Indian art I saw at the V&A. these Indian artists stayed away from faking a 'real' perspective (you know-- vanishing points and all that) and the resulting space seemed very natural for a two dimensional medium.
the winning artist is Tomislav Torjanac who is very painterly and had a great classic pitch. my vote however will go to this stunning series by Andrea Offermann who seemed to capture the unique lyrical aura of the story.